Hokum

by Paul Beatty

  Helen Clark Schwartz, the heroine's mother

  Christine (Oreo), the heroine

  Moishe Qimmie O), the heroine's brother

  Concerning a f ew of the characters, an apergu or two

  Jacob: He makes boxes ('Jake the Box Man, A Boxeleh for Every Tchotchkeleh"). As he often says, "It's a living. I mutche along." Transla­tion: "I am, kayn aynhoreh, a very rich man."

  James and Louise: In the DNA crapshoot for skin color, when the die was cast, so was the dye. James came out nearest the color of the pips (on the scale below, he is a 10), his wife the cube. Louise is fair, very fair, an albino manquee (a just-off-the-scale —1). James is a shrewd businessman, Louise one of the great cooks of our time.

  Samuel Schwartz: Just another pretty face.

  Helen Clark: Singer, pianist, mimic, math freak (a 4 on the color scale).

  NOTE: There is no "very black." Only white people use this term. To blacks, "black" is black enough (and in most cases too black, since the majority of black people are not nearly so black as your black pocketbook). If a black person says, "John is very black," he is referring to John's politics, not his skin color.

  A word about weather

  There is no weather per se in this book. Passing reference is made to weather in a few instances. Assume whatever season you like throughout. Summer makes the most sense in a book of this length. That way, pages do not have to be used up describing people taking off and putting on overcoats.

  6. Ta-ta Troezen

  Oreo's good-byes to her tutors

  Milton the milkman came up on the porch and said to Oreo, "I hear you're leaving us to go find your father. Well, good luck to you. Funny thing about trips. You ever notice that if you meet somebody where they're not supposed to be, in a foreign country, say, or another city, you're happier to see them than if you bumped into them every now and then where they were supposed to be? I mean, take me, for instance. You see me almost every day and you're glad to see me, but we're just acquaintances, right? You couldn't call us friends. But if you saw me in Cincinnati, we'd act like we were long lost buddies. And if we met in France—why, there'd be no separating us. Then we'd meet again in Philly and we'd be back to being just acquaintances again, right? Now, before you go, I'd like to tell you my theory of divorce, based on the experience of a friend of mine. Now, this friend of mine—let's call him Stan—and his wife—let's call her Alice—had a big problem. She preferred a night bath before sex, he liked a morning shower after sex. What with one thing and another, one of them was always too clean or too dirty for the other one. So they rarely got together, so they got a divorce. Now, my theory is that the divorce rate could be reduced by ninety percent if, before marriage, couples would honestly discuss, one, the time of day they like to have sex and, two, the time of day they like to take baths and/or showers. A lot of heartache could be avoided later if they did this, because you can tell a lot about a person's character from these two things. Well, goodbye, kid. It's been a pleasure serving you all these years. Take care, and remember to drink at least a quart of milk a day."

  "Good-bye, Milton."

  Douglas Floors interrupted a crucial discussion of the Sino-Soviet War on Oreo's last day with him to inveigh against Central Park. "It is not quite so bad as Fairmount Park, of course, being smaller, but it is bad enough. The foul Sheep Meadow, the treacherous Great Lawn, and—I actually get a frisson every time I think of it—the Ramble, where benighted creatures actually go to watch birds." He shuddered behind his dark glasses and turned his chair more directly to the wall, the better to avoid seeing Louise's bare arm as she passed through the room. Her vaccination scar reminded him of a chrysanthemum. "I contribute to an enlightened East Coast group determined to pave all the parks. We'd like to start with Central. Our research indicates we have the best chance there. Of course, there are the lunatic conservation groups to contend with, but they will soon be neutralized by hay fever, poison ivy, ticks, and all the other little goodies their beloved Mother Nature inflicts on them whenever they go a-Maying." He snickered with nonnatural satisfaction.

  "Remember," he said as he was leaving, "look out for rock outcroppings. Manhattan is full of schist."

  And so are you, thought Oreo, misunderstanding him.

  "Good-bye, Oreo."

  "Good-bye, Doug."

  Professor Lindau, after all his years of giving blood, was now taking. We went daily for a transfusion of the blood he had donated over the last decade, convinced by Milton the milkman that getting back his callow plasma, his jejune erythrocytes, his puerile leukocytes, his tender platelets would make him young again. Oreo believed that his conflations with his latest wedge were doing more for his rejuvenation than any old stale blood.

  For her last assignment, the professor had given her a standard treatise in the field of economic agronomy upon which she was to model an essay on the same subject. She read the first and last words of the treatise, titled Lying Fallow, or What You Should Know About Federal Subsidies, and started and ended her essay with similar words. In Lying Fallow, the first word was snow and the last word was potatoes. In her book-length essay (Secretaries of Agriculture I Have Known, or God: The First Economic Agronomist), Oreo experimented with monsoon and broccoli as her first and last words, but decided they were too exotic, and, what is more, monsoon had too many syllables. Already she had strayed from the obvious pattern Fallow's author had established with his forceful yet sensitive first and last words. After an evening with Roget, Oreo decided that her first word would be rain and her last word rice. She was more than willing to sacrifice syllables (her two to Fallow's four) for alliteration. She quickly filled in the middle section of her essay, using the same technique. What she sacrificed in cogency, she gained in mechanicality (her serendipitous assembly-line gobbledygook against Fallow's numbing agroeconomic clarity). Thus a typical sentence in Fallow: "Wheat farm B showed a declining profit-loss ratio during the harvest season," became in Oreo's manuscript: "Oat ranch wasp played the drooping excess-death proportion while a crop pepper." The professor was amused by Oreo's little farewell drollery, which ran to more than six hundred pages, single-spaced.

  After the lesson, the professor excused himself and went to the bathroom. When he returned, he said, "Now that I have sifted out, I shall not go into a long wearing away. I shall merely give you a big comfort and take my leave." He hugged Oreo.

  "Good-bye, professor."

  "God be with ye, Oreo."

  Oreo's good-byes to her family

  The family farewells took three days because Louise needed the time to prepare a box lunch for her granddaughter to take on her journey perilous. The peroration of those good-byes went as follows.

  Oreo said good-bye to her grandfather first, since that would take the shortest amount of time. "Good-bye, Grandfather," she said, kissing him on the cheek.

  James, who had been grinning a second before, stopped grinning. There was a vacant stare on his face. This often happened and signaled the fact that he was giving his facial muscles a rest.

  Oreo went next to Louise. "You look real nice, chile. Yo' white dress is spotless—you might eem say maculin." Louise dragged over Oreo's box lunch—more accurately, her duffelbag lunch, since that was what it was in. They could not find a box big enough for all the food Louise had prepared.

  Oreo strapped the lunch to her backpack frame. Since the food took up so much space, Oreo had to repack the other equipment she was taking on her journey. She soon grew tired of shifting it around, said, "Oh, the hell with it," and shoved it into the duffel bag next to the lunch. It was a toothbrush, but difficult to pack because its interproximal stimulator, or rubber tip, and its bristles faced in opposite directions. Oreo kissed Louise.

  "Good-bye, Grandmother."

  Louise kissed her. " 'Bye, Oreo."

  Jimmie C. made a long speech in cha-key-key-wah, telling Oreo how much he loved her and promising not to be a yold. Then he said, "I know you won't be gone for a spavol time, but"—and
he sang this—"nevertheless and winnie-the-pooh, verily, I'm going to miss you." His voice had changed with age. His sweet countertenor was now a sweet boy soprano.

  She kissed him on both cheeks. "Good-bye, Jimmie C."

  "Vladi, Oreo."

  When Helen embraced Oreo, she did not say anything, but her head equation, brought on by Jimmie C.'s keening in the background, was a simple

  L = P + GD

  where L = leavetaking, mph

  P = pain, ppm

  G = gevalts, cwt

  D = davening, pf

  "Good-bye, Oreo," Helen said when her equation was over. She was doubly sad, since she too would soon be leaving, to go on the road again.

  "Good-bye, Mother."

  Suddenly there was a sound like the primal rasp of a rusty hinge on a long unopened door—the pearly gates, perhaps. "Now, as I was saying . . . ," James croaked in his disused voice.

  The whole family was stunned. They gaped at James in amazement. He was not aware of it now, but a few moments earlier all the good-byes had led him to believe that he was being abandoned. The shock of this fearful defection had quickened his broken blood vessel, which reached out across the vascular gap like a severed snake, probing the brain's topography for its other half. It made a slipknot around the break as a temporary measure until it could repair itself permanently. His anterograde amnesia disappeared. He stood up with a crisp popping and cracking of joints, the sound of Louise snapping gigantic green beans. His half swastika straightened into a ramrod.

  His wife and daughter embraced him joyously, and he was reintroduced to his grandchildren for perhaps the umpty-third time.

  "Well, I hate to greet and run . . .," Oreo began. She had no shame.

  When Oreo's impending journey was explained to him, a shudder ran through him at the mention of Samuel's name. But the slipknot in his brain held fast. James was somewhat consoled when he was told that Samuel and Helen had been divorced for years. Helen promised to postpone going on her road trip for a few days in order to help Louise catch James up on all that he had missed during his years of amnesia. She had come to love the road, but once James was fully recovered and making money again, she could make shorter swings and come home more often.

  Louise timidly approached her husband. "Do de name Will Farmer ring a gong?" she asked.

  James thought a while, shook his head. "No, can't say that it does. Do I know him?"

  "No, and I don' neither," she said, a glaze coming over her eyes as she lied in her teeth. "De name jus' come to me in a dream. I was dreaming 'bout one dem horny-back Baptist churches."

  "You mean hard-shell," James said.

  "Yeah, one dem. Anyway, a man was rollin' in de aisles, and de preacher say, 'You bet' come on out cho ack, Will Farmer.'Jus' thought you might recomember 'body by dat name."

  James put a strain on his slipknot trying to figure out why he should know someone in Louise's dream, but he shook it off and went on to other things. "Helen, what do you think of this idea? I was thinking of making a special mailing to all the homes for used Jews and—"

  "You mean old folks' homes?" asked Helen.

  "Naturally. Well, I was thinking—"

  Oreo interrupted to initiate a final round of good-byes, then slipped out the door as unobtrusively as she could, considering her backpack.

  Betty the nymphomaniac tore herself away from her father long enough to wave good-bye from her bedroom window and shout, "Don't forget those dirty postcards you promised me!"

  "Vladi, vladi," Jimmie C. called wistfully from the front porch until she was out of sight.

  And Oreo was on her way.

  7. Periphetes

  On the subway-elevated to Thirtieth Street Station

  Oreo did what she always did on subways. She speculated or she compared. She speculated on how many people in, say, Denver, Colo- rado, were at that very moment making love. How many people in Cincinnati were having their teeth filled? As the El passed the Arena and the gilded dome of Provident Mutual's clock tower, in a mad rush to become a true subway with its plunge into the Fortieth Street stop, Oreo wondered how many people in Honolulu were scratching themselves. Was the number of people taking books out of the library in Duluth higher than one-tenth of one percent of the city's car owners? she mused. And what about the ratio of nose picking per thousand population in Portland, Oregon—or Portland, Maine, for that matter?

  When she had tired of speculating, she went on to comparing. She looked up and down both sides of the car. On her first sweep, she concentrated on the size and shape of all the noses she could see. She awarded appropriate but valueless (imaginary) prizes to the possessors of the largest, smallest, and most unusual. A man wearing an astrakhan cap won the prize for the largest, with a nose big enough to accommodate nostrils that put Oreo in mind of adjacent plane hangars, fur-lined. His prize: free monthly vacuuming with a yet-to-be-invented nose Hoover. Modeling clay, the prize for the smallest nose, went to a red-headed woman with the nose of an ant. A hand passing from the redhead's formicine brow to her mouth would have to make no humanoid detours around cartilaginous prominences. Most unusual was the cross-eyed young man whose nose pointed to his left ear. Picasso rechauffe. His prize wasn't really his. It was a blindfold for others to wear in his presence.

  Before she could go on to hands and shoes, Oreo got a seat. Sitting on the edge of the seat because of her backpack, she felt at the neck of her dress to make sure the mezuzah was still in place. She loosened the drawstring of her black handbag (the kind that looks like a horse's feed bag), pushed aside the bed socks her father had left her, and took out the coffee-stained list of clues.

  1. Sword and sandals

  2. Three legs

  3. The great divide

  4. Sow

  5. Kicks

  6. Pretzel

  7. Fitting

  8. Down by the river

  9. Temple

  10. Lucky number

  11. Amazing

  12. Sails

  She crossed off the first item on the list. If number 2 was as farfetched as number 1 had been, "Three legs" could mean anything from a broken chair to Siamese twins. No matter. She was ready for any kind of shit, prepared to go where she was not wanted, to butt in where she had no business, to test her meddle all over the map. Oreo was one pushy chick.

  Her bravery was beyond question. She had chosen, against the advice of older, more cautious adventurers, to eschew the easy canoe trip up the Delaware, piece-of-cake portage across the swamplands of New Jersey, and no-sweat glissade across the Hudson to Manhattan and to travel instead the far more problematic overland route via the Penn Central Railroad. What further ensign of Oreo's courage need be cited?

  The subway concourse at Thirtieth Street

  Oreo knew that there were several stiff trials ahead before she reached the official starting point of her overland journey, the Waiting Room of Thirtieth Street Station. The first and second trials came together: the Broken Escalator and the Leaky Pipes. Countless previous travelers had suffered broken ankles and/or Chinese water torture as they made their way between the subway and Thirtieth Street Station. With the advent of wide-heeled ugly shoes, which replaced hamstring-snapping spike heels, much of the danger had been taken out of the Broken Escalator's gaping treads. Much—in fact, all—of the movement had been taken out of the B.E. almost immediately after it began its rounds. Thus it had had a life of only two minutes and thirty seconds as a moving staircase before it expired to become the Broken Escalator of Philadelphia legend. Oreo had prepared for this leg of the journey by wearing sandals, which provided firm footing on the treads of the B.E. and also served as a showcase for her short-toed perfect feet.

  The Leaky Pipes filled the traveler's need for irritation, humiliation, irrigation, and syncopation. According to the number of drops that fell on the traveler from the Leaky Pipes, he or she was irritated, humiliated, or irrigated. These degrees were largely a function of the Pipes' syncopation. With a simple one, t
wo, three, four, a few even simpler souls would be caught by the drops of the offbeat. One who fell victim three or more times to this rhythm could safely be said to have passed beyond the bounds of irritation and into the slink of humiliation. The unlucky ones were those who got caught in a one, two, three, four, —, six, seven, eight. They would end up soaking wet by the time they got to the foot or the head (depending on their direction) of the Broken Escalator. Ninety percent of those caught by the one, two, three, four, —, six, seven, eight were white. They just couldn't get the hang of it. Black people were usually caught by the normal, unsyncopated, one, two, one, two—it was so simple, they couldn't believe it.

  Oreo stood at the top of the B.E. and closed her eyes. She did not want to be distracted by looking at the drops. She just listened. She was in luck. The Pipes were in the one, two, three, four phase. She opened her eyes and observed that the drops (two) and four) hit the same side of the B.E. on every other tread. It was a simple matter then to make her way down along the dry side, leaping over the treads on which the drops fell to avoid lateral splash. She did so hastily—and just in time too, for the Pipes switched into a different cycle just as her sandal hit the last tread, and one drop narrowly missed her exposed heel.

  The third trial was suffering through the graffiti of Cool Clam, Kool Rock, Pinto, Timetable, Zoom Lens, and Corn Bread (the self-styled "King of the Walls," who crowned his B with a three-pronged diadem). It was not considered fair to squint and stumble along the passageway to the station. No, the fully open eye had to be offered up to such xenophobic, no-news lines as

  DRACULA AND MANUFACTURERS HANOVER TRUST SUCK

  the polymorphous-perversity of

  BABE LOVES

  BILL & MARY & LASSIE & SPAM

  the airy, wuthering affirmation of

  CHARLOTTE & EMILY LIVE!

  the Platonic pique of

  SOCRATES THINKS HE KNOWS ALL THE QUESTIONS

  Oreo stared at these writings, a test of her strength. So intense was her concentration that at first she paid little notice to a tickle at her right shoulder. She felt it again and whirled to look into the eyes of a lame man she had passed near the Babe-Bill-Mary-Lassie-Spam graffito. One of the foil-wrapped packages from her duffel-bag lunch was in his hand. He had been picking her packet! She reached out to grab it but ducked when she saw the man's arm go around in a baseball swing. There was a whoosh! as molecules of air bumped against one another, taking the cut her head should have taken. Strike one. With the count 0—1, she noticed that the bat was a cane. She ducked again for strike two. "Well, aint this a blip!" Oreo said aloud, finally getting annoyed. She grabbed the cane and gave the man a mild hed-blo. She did not want to strike a lame old man with a full-force hed-krac. When the old pickpacket saw the look in her eye, he turned and ran down the passageway at Olympic speed. He was really hotfooting it, honey! He was really picking them up and putting them down! Because of her backpack, Oreo did not catch him until he neared the end of the passageway. Felling him with a flying fut-kik, she pressed on his Adam's apple with his cane until he promised he would not try to get up until she gave him leave.